Our Thoughts on Ontraport

ONTRAPORT is one of the best kept secrets of business and marketing automation.

With no setup fees and a monthly cost that is less than 1/10th of what some of their competitors are charging for the same level of service (though still not quite as affordable as ActiveCampaign), there’s no question that Ontraport is designed with small businesses in mind.

You might think that their relatively low cost would come at the expense of product quality, but this isn’t the case. Their email deliverability rates are some of the highest among all automation vendors we’ve seen, and their range of services are equally as impressive.

As such, it’s unsurprising that a large number of well-known bloggers, coaches, small businesses of all kinds and online training companies have been flocking to Ontraport over the past few years.

Ontraport User Reviews

Ontraport's Pros and Cons

ONTRAPORT recently updated their interface (4.0) making it bolder and easier to navigate. They receive lots of praise for their platform, which packs a lot of punch for such a relatively low price.

Pros

Pricing – The most obvious benefit of ONTRAPORT is the affordability of their service. At $297/month with no setup fees and two hours of free onboarding calls, they’re positioned very competitively.

What’s important to consider with Ontraport is that they give you access to all of their features, and the ability to store 25,000 contacts and send 100,000 emails. While some other tools may start at a lower entry price, you would likely pay 5-10x the cost of ONTRAPORT for the same level of contacts & features. They’re scalable so that as your business grows, they can grow with you so you don’t need to worry about switching systems later. The offer of a 90 day risk free guarantee is practically unheard of these days along with month-to-month or discounted annual pricing option after the 90 day risk guarantee period.

Great community – ONTRAPORT has award winning customer support via phone, chat, and email during most business hours. They’re clearly committed to the success of their customers, holding a 97% satisfaction rate and all their reps work from one central location for seamless communication between support and development.

They upgraded all of their servers for redundancy, invested in a content delivery network to ensure the fastest speed internationally and are constantly looking for ways to make their app quick and responsive. They also have a great community of users on their Facebook user group, an education site that’s free to ONTRAPORT customers, a quarterly bootcamp and certified consultant course and an annual business building event in Santa Barbara, CA.

Unified system – ONTRAPORT is the automated engine behind your marketing campaigns, seamlessly integrating your emails, landing pages, ecommerce and more with your CRM so you can hyper-target your leads and convert them into customers.

When you have separate systems managing all of these operations, your data is strewn about and it’s challenging to be able to make intelligent, data-driven decisions about your business. ONTRAPORT combines your marketing efforts into one, central system so you have ONE place to call for support and ONE place to look at your business data.

Custom objects – ONTRAPORT offers the ability to build custom objects which is only available in enterprise systems such as SalesForce, Marketo or Eloqua. Custom objects allows you to create relationships between multiple databases. unique to your organization.

eCommerce features – ONTRAPORT has a large range of impressive ecommerce features including automatic credit card payment collections and the ability to add upsells, cross-sells, cart abandonment and credit card expiration notification automation.

Cons

Dashboard user interface – While you can create virtually any metric you’d like, their reporting dashboard isn’t particularly visually appealing as it doesn’t have graphs and charts.

Automation campaign builder – While Ontraport’s campaign builder is easy to use and sufficiently powerful, it works by adding text-based rules one under another. We find the visual ‘flowchart’ style campaign builder used by some of Ontraport’s competitors more intuitive to use.

Ontraport Integrations

Ontraport currently have 34 integrations (displayed below). On top of this, Ontraport have a comprehensive API, providing the possibility of developing your own integrations.

Sure, some screens could be more intuitive and hence takes an initial extra hour or so to master, but functionality, value, support and ease of use are all of the highest standard and head and shoulder above many of the competitors charging twice as much. For me, a great step forward.

15th January 2018, 12:24 am

Overall9.5

Ease of Use8

Customer Support10

0

1

Heather King

OntraPort is the WORST!

Every day it's a new punch in the gut using OntraPort. It is the least intuitive, most inconvenient possible software. They lack so many completely basic features, constantly making life harder for me and my customers. The constant issues arising from this software maker and my business look incredibly unprofessional, it's just unbelievable that software can be this bad. I'm giving a .5 rating because 0 isn't allowed.

31st March 2017, 2:11 pm

Overall0.5

Ease of Use0.5

Customer Support2

5

1

Alternatives to Ontraport

Infusionsoft is the most popular alternative to Ontraport, as their pricing and target audience is relatively similar to Ontraport’s. Infusionsoft is particularly good for small businesses with 2 – 25 staff members.

Marketo is a suitable automation tool for mid-market B2B and B2C marketers. While more expensive than Ontraport (their pricing starts at $895/month), their platform is worth considering if Ontraport isn’t a good fit.

Starting at $9 per month, ActiveCampaign are by far the most cost-effective marketing automation tool out there, as well as being one of the best-designed all-in-one marketing automation, email marketing & CRM tools. We use them, and highly recommend them!